A Wrench in the Machine
Team Titan Think Tank Issue 26 "Occupied Territory" (Part 3)- A Wrench in the Machine.' Front cover- shows the backdrop of Titan City's skyscrapers, the purple sky, and swarms of Reichdroids and lasers in the background, along with a giant flying whale, as in the foreground, Wrench flies at the reader in his full nano-armour, blasting the reader with his rotating quad plasma cannons The issue opens showing the bottom of the Titan-Whale flying in the purple sky above the city streets, flying between skyscrapers as the reader sees the grasping hands of the civilian populace reaching up. Out of one of the buildings bursts the gigantic snake previously seen in the distance as it coils its way up a skyscraper and then stretches its body out at the whale as its giant maw comes snapping up from below as the bottom of the whale as it flies past. One moment, the entire city screamed in Bltizkrieg's voice, now they attack again. The whale's body rises higher to avoid the snapping snake jaws. And then Chaos steps to the edge of a building above where the whale flies and yells "CHAOOOOOOOOOOOOS!" The reader sees Chaos the Third's pasty face, his long lab coat with a glittery C stitched on the back, and his psycadelic swirling goggles and he gestures down with pink rubber gloves wiggling them at whale. Green energy radiates from his body and spreads out from the top of the skyscraper as the energy explodes out in a massive 500ft diamater sphere which includes Whale and covers a vast amount of buildings too. The comic cuts to show Redemption, Tonic, Games Master and Mister Psychic insidee the whale's mouth, Cain also flying just in front of it. Reb flinches as the bright light comes and as he takes his hand away, Tonic, Games Master and Mister Psychic have gone. There are just wisps of energy where they were. "Dr Toni?" Reb looks round frantically. CUT We cut to show Tonic, falling out of a green burst of energy as she stands up to look at the whale flying above and finds herself surrounded, as she stands on a road filled with civilians all looking at her. The comic cuts to show her in infa-red as swarms of black motes descend on her flying through her pores in her skin. Tonic shakes her head violently "...N...no...I...I d...don't want to..." CUT The comic cuts back to Reb, only with Cain now in the mouth of Whale with him, unaware of Yu and Sonne's fate "Erm.. Mr Psychic? Mr Master? Dr Toni? You're not hiding under the tongue are you?" Reb looks confused. There is no response. "Erm..." he continues to look round as whale hurtles onwards in the direction it was heading. We cut back down to Tonic as she sees the whale fly off, and leave her behind. The comic cuts ahead of whale, as Cain is fully sucked into the mouth as it zooms on 1000ft. The comic then cuts on top of the whale as the whale suddenly jerks forward and whilst Yu lowers his centre of balance and remains on, Sonne is sent bouncing down the back of the whale followed by Esc-ape. "Gunn! Stop yourself!" As Yu screams out, he sees Sonne crash into a building that the whale flies past taking out about three floors worth of building wall. Gunn stands on the ledge of one of the buildings he'd impacted, glancing at the flying whale with his hands on his hips. "The academy never told us about this..." Sonne watches as he sees the whale flying off at high speed and then he sees what it looks like when a distant massive flying object hits an invisible, larger flying object; mainly, it looks really confusing. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM. A lot of windows around the distant impact shatter and many tops of buildings collapse. The comic cuts to the whale itself as its body crumples up like a cushion being punched by a large fist as its mouth closes and its eyes close. In the next panel, the comic shows Blitzkrieg Island de-cloak as Whale collides with it. The comic cuts inside the mouth to show Reb and Cain flung further inside the whale, bouncing off the 'walls' of its throat. On top of the whale, Master of Arms is flung forward and his face smashed into the whale. He rolls forward and just he falls towards Blitzkrieg Island, he grabs onto a roll of flesh above whale's giant cartoon eyebrows. Yu looks down as he sees some of the front most towers of Blitzkrieg Island crash down, though the central, swashtika emblazoned tower that Tommy Gunn attacked alone years ago, still stands, along with towers around and behind it. CUT Tonic is running in pursuit of whale, somehow not leaving footsteps in her wake. She shakes her head, and struggles, pressing her wrist laungher against her leg and releasing it, discharging a dart...into her own flesh. "...N...no. Not me...n...not having m...me..." The comic shows a shot of what she would look like from x-ray, as the electrical sparks shoot through her body from the dart, but the current generated by the nanites propels the dart's attack away. Sonne looks down, and sees Tonic surrounded and limping her way through the crowds, currently just blankly staring at her. "Oh, Zark!" Gunn leaps off the building, armoured suit giving him a healthy shove. He freefalls for a few stories, then kicks in his Zero-G locomotion. A shot inside the helmet shows Gunn's targetting reticules closing on the fleeing scientist. "C'mon, C'mon..." he mutters, the altimeter falling faster and faster before levelling out. He then deactivates the Zero G field and aims a beam at Tonic as he soars overhead, yanking her up from her feet, as he activates his rocket boosters. "Gotcha!" He pulls the beams in tight, before taking her slight frame in arms. "Hah! If only the boys back home could see that!" "N...needs m...more c...calibrations...apparently..." "She's been infected Sonne, but I am keeping the nanite control at bay for now... could be a problem in the long term though." GRANDDAD pipes directly to Sonne Sonne's joy quickly fades to sobriety. "I s...should b...be able to stop it...I think..." "BREAKER is hammering the nanites as best as it can, but it seems something else has taken the reins of the network. You need to take out the controllers, since the hampering of the nanites is just that" GRANDDAD says further to Sonne. "Cain has a mobile communication device with him. Do you want me to see if I can contact him and the others?" "If anyone can get a location on them, Pops, it's you. You're pretty amazing." "Course I am, I'm a Gunn. Anything you want me to say?" "Just the usual stuff. Get where he is, and see if we can rendezvous on the giant... thing that keeps saying Wales. I think it's a patriot." "Its not Welsh, you idiot. It makes me sad that there are clearly no Welsh accents in space. Its a fine accent." "Do the Welsh have a space program? I don't think they -... this is getting off topic. See what you can find out, Pops." "T...tell him I'm c...compromised...not my mind, but it had...nervous c...control." "Yeah. That too" Sonne adds. "On it, lad." CUT The comic cuts inside the Whale, where Cain and Reb pick themselves up in the darkness, only the light of Cain's ringing mobile illuminates them. Cain looks to his phone, which says 'GRANDDAD' on the caller ID "Thank goodness." he says, bringing the phone to his head, and before he hits the "Accept" button gives Reb an aside of "I was half expecting Kaan'qsst." He clears his throat, and the phone beeps curtly. "Cain speaking." "Cain, lad. We're separted from you, which means you are out of my splendid nanite frequency countering range. They just got nanite, but we picked her up, so she is safe for now. She says the nanites are enacting nervous control. Also, something else is controlling the nanites now. BREAKER is hitting them back, but its only the most temporary solution." "Hm. I suppose that would be a problem for poor Reb here. I'll tell you what, GRANDAD... see if you can't convince Sonne to bring that wonderous little bubble of immunity up here so we can finish all this, mm?" In the background Reb asks. "Whats a problem for me?" "And I may have a... couple, more requests, if you'll listen", Cain adds. "All right, gimme a mo. You still in the whale?" GRANDDAD asks. "Regrettably so." he says, tapping his claw with very little noise at all "Gunns, locked and loaded." And the call hangs up. Cain sighs, pocketing the phone again. "Nothing too much, my boy. Provided we stay nice and safe in this sturdy, nanite-proof friend of yours." he says, perhaps not entirely convinced "Erm...how do you make things nanite proof?" "I can think of one particularly effective way..." he grins, as we begin to hear a jet turbine roar start to become audible. CUT The comic cuts to behind Sonne as Esc-Ape phases out of a building he phased through when he fell off the whale, and as he drops into free fall he creates a white portal under him and drops through it. As behind Sonne, landing atop a taller building, comes Citizen Ape, his ginormous spiked shadow cast over Sonne and Tonic "Citizen Ape gonna open tiny can!" he booms down and as Sonne's attention is turned to the ape, his attention is also then drawn to the twenty Reichdroid Orbiters in pursuit in two wings to left and right that were blasting the whale. "They're still in the whale, and they need you! Move it boy!" GRANDDAD pipes The Reichdroids open fire with their triangular helmet visors and blast out heat beams from them. Sonne's boosters blast him ahead, as lasers zig zag and zip around him, pieces of buildign and glasa fly around him as he and Tonic phase right through them. "WOOOOOOO! YEAH!" Gunn thrills. And then a rocket booster gets hit. "Uhhoh-" But the laser just glances off as he rockets ahead. "Huh. Must my our lucky day, right?" "M...maybe y...yours..." Tonic responds. "Lighten up! After all, this is Zero-G!" Gunn laughs, doing a quick barrel roll, having the time of his life whilst in mortal peril. Tonic is literally paralysed in terror. "P...please s...stop that..." CUT As we cut back to Cain and Reb "So erm.. Mr Cain, what are we going to do now?" "Well Reb, it's a dangerous city. I wouldn't go anywhere these days without a Gunn at your side." He laughs briefly, but chokes it back. "Oh right, Gunn, like Sonne and like a fire arm. Thats funny," He isn't laughing. "Yes, well... when you're raised by a maniac who insists 'I'll send you back to the stone age!' whilst sending an army of dinosaurs armed with assault rifles classes as pithy, it becomes rather difficult to recover from it." "That must of been hard... did he have to genetically modify you to not call him out on this? Or at least make it impossible for your kind to groan at jokes?" "It's odd, you know. They seemed good at the time." Cain looks distant for a moment, as faded out comic panels showing various villainous exploits of his appear in a dreamy way, "It all just seemed so right, at the time..." The conversation is cut out by... "Attention Team Titan, my name is Wrench. You might have heard of me, but frankly, I don't really care." You hear thousands of voices, the voices of every nano-infected in the city, to be exact, muted slightly inside the whale, but still quite audible "I have control of the nanite network from Blitzkrieg, so whatever you did... thanks. For reference, I am not a Nazi. Yes, I allied with one... waiting for this moment." The comic cuts to Wrench himself, stood atop the Megaplex, watching everything below. His armoured clothing has gone and reverted to its normal state. His eyes are closed in concentration. "The chance to bring everything back to us. The humans. Graham Stevens had the right idea, he just went about it wrong." here is a strong silence. He smiles, as he fiddles with his glasses. "Thanks for listening" says all the populace of Titan City. And then every nanite infected being screams; it is a brief scream, but it being everyone, it is incredibly loud The comic cuts to Mister Psychic, clutching his head saying "My word! Something doesn't feel right..." The comic cuts to show Mr Psychic's brain in x-ray as energy lashes out across his body from the nanites, and his CONSIDERABLY LARGE brain shrinks in panels... "It's as if my mind is telling me to eat salad with a dinner fork..." CUT We cut to Sonne and Tonic. "Sonne, somethin- WROAAAAAHHHHHHH!" comes GRANDDAD'S scream in his head, as then Tonic screams. She suddenly claws at her eyes, still screaming. behind Sonne, he sees Citizen Ape roar, grabbing onto his own head as he shrinks rapidly in size. The stone skin chips off of CA as he shirnks down to the ground and becomes a normal, confused gorilla. "Sorry about the pain, citizens" says Wrench's voice. "That'll be the new command I gave the nanites to remove all genetic impurities. My first step of the world without superhumans. And since aliens are going to take our planet, I suppose we should take this gift Team Titan gave us, and make this pocket our own. And the first step to that goal... remove Team Titan." CUT We then cut to Cain as he digests all of this, and then his phone rings again "Yes? Oh, for the love of-" he says, looking down at the phone. Which this time does actually display the caller as "Kaan'qsst" He answers quickly, turning his back on Reb, "I assume you heard all of that." Only Cain's responses are shown to the reader, after each panel where he speaks, there is a silent panel where he listens to a tiny unreadable speech bubble. "Our task isn't far different. The world needs Titan City. All we were *supposed* to have to do to get it back was take down Blitzkrieg." Reb looks over at him eyes brows raised "Well, I couldn't say you're wrong there. Unfortunately this little coup of his is going to make it rather difficult to do anything direct. Tell me... what's *your* part in this plan?" "Bringing back this city's power, but unless you stop him, he will simply remove them again" comes the response that the reader this time sees CUT As Sonne sees the ape grow in size again, once again becoming stone-spiked and humongous Tonic stops scratching her eyes. "I...I...I saw..." she is shaking "What? What did you see?" "...What everyone else can..." "What?!" Out of a window not far above, Mr Psychic steps out onto a balcony "I...In h...human terms I'm t...technically b...blind... by s...some d...definitions..." "Are you saying that maniac just rewrote your blindness better?" "N...no..." Mr Psychic presses a button on his hat, which begins spinning and sends off a blast of energy. "He t...turned m...my p..powers off..." Sonne flinches as the blast is targetted at him "They d...don't TURN off..." And then all of Titan City speaks again. "Team Titan. I have temporarily wrested control from Wrench. To stop this, you must stop him, or the city's powers will be taken. I am a friend." "I don't -like- this." Gunn growls, pulling up short for a moment. He glances at the gormless civillians chanting at once. "WHO ARE YOU? WHERE ARE YOU?" "The one aiding you. Wrench is on the roof of the Megaplex. The building with the giant M on it. Go! There is... no time for more talk." "Then we'll see how he feels with a Gunn pointed at him." End of issue